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The Reluctant Transgender Role Model

AT the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, I wheedled a ticket to “Becoming Chaz,” a documentary about the sex change of Chastity Bono. Having long admired the Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato World of Wonder productions — slyly edu-taining films like “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” and oodles of just-louche-enough-for-reality-TV shows like “RuPaul’s Drag Race” — I anticipated their usual mix of human interest, alternative lifestyle and salacious tabloid.

This unflinchingly personal film, which will have its premiere on Oprah Winfrey’s network on Tuesday, details Chastity Bono’s journey from her spangled childhood in rhinestone pantsuits on “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour” to a more recent two years in her televised life: Chastity, now Chaz, invited cameras to witness the searingly intimate experience of his gender transition.

Chaz, 42, and Jennifer Elia, his longtime girlfriend, must navigate his hormone injections, mood swings and personality changes, and live through a medical procedure that is part of the process of making Chaz a legal male in the State of California: he undergoes “top surgery” and has his breasts removed.

The operation is so graphic, and such a commitment — physically, emotionally and financially — that as a wincing viewer you come away with a palpable understanding of how unendurably he must be suffering in his body to want to have his own sex characteristics amputated.

I came away forced to confront a whole swag-bag full of transphobias that I didn’t know I’d had. So I went to Los Angeles to talk to the filmmakers, and to Chaz himself.

Just sitting on a couch with Chaz at his publicist’s office is a consciousness-raising experience. He’s an affable, candid, pudgy, regular guy: very sweet, very comfortable in his skin, jeans, navy blue polo shirt and simple boots. His look might seem deliberately invisible if not for his hair, which he shapes into an excellent controlled pomp that could be described as Office-Casual Elvis.

At this point in his transition, Chaz is in his “second puberty,” a six- to seven-year process of hormone injections. The medical technology for genital reconstruction surgery (masculine genitoplasty, for a transgender man like Chaz) is still too new, expensive, imperfect and risky for him to opt for “bottom surgery.”

“I am in a holding pattern,” he said. “The payoff just isn’t quite enough. I wish I had a penis, but I am O.K. for now.”

At age 13, Chaz told me, he knew he was attracted to women, and assumed he was a lesbian.

“I knew my whole life something was different,” he said. “As a small kid, I could be one of the boys, playing sports, fitting in. When I hit puberty, I felt like my body was literally betraying me. I got smacked everywhere with femaleness. That was really traumatic.”

Realizing that he should be male took years of deduction.

“Around 2001, I started analyzing lesbians. I started to realize that even really butch-acting or -dressing women still had a strong female identity that I never had.”

Photo

Chaz (formerly Chastity Bono) at home in California.Credit
Kevin Scanlon for The New York Times

Though emboldened by seeing transgender people in the media, he still thought of gender-transition as the last resort of the suicidal: “I thought, transgender people are much worse off than I am. That’s why they’re willing to risk everything to be who they are. But the older I got, the harder it got to stay in my body.”

Several scenes in the film are interviews with Cher, who I assumed would act as a guide and interpreter through this signal event in her family. Yet Cher struggles throughout the film and never quite offers a sound bite of unequivocal support for her transgender son. Seeing Cher — gay icon nonpareil — so uncharacteristically jangled raised a sticky batch of questions:

Could it be possible that the fact that Chaz is now a man is somehow Cher’s fault? Did the toxic culture of celebrity damage Chastity/Chaz’s gender identity? Did Cher’s almost drag-queenlike hyper-female persona somehow devour Chastity’s emerging femininity? Could Chaz’s transition have been motivated by gender-bent Oedipal revenge? Is he reclaiming the childhood attention his superstar mother always diverted?

I had to ask: It is remotely possible that he needed to make the transition because his mom is Cher?

He gave me a warm and genuine smile.

“I don’t think the way I grew up had any effect on this issue,” Chaz said. “There’s a gender in your brain and a gender in your body. For 99 percent of people, those things are in alignment. For transgender people, they’re mismatched. That’s all it is. It’s not complicated, it’s not a neurosis. It’s a mix-up. It’s a birth defect, like a cleft palate.”

But being born into celebrity created a different hurdle: Chaz knew he would not be able to change sexes privately. “I thought, the whole world is going to find out! How am I going to be able to live a life after that? I was scared. I believed that people were going to be actively hostile towards me.”

As a “last ditch effort,” he tried to live as a male but without medical intervention. It didn’t work. “I feel very traditionally male,” he said. “I needed a male body.”

Being in-between genders, Chaz said, was far more difficult than becoming a man. He was a misfit. Now, he said, he is treated much better by people, especially men.

“I’m constantly shocked by how friendly and cool straight men are to each other. ‘Hey, buddy, how’s it going?’ I expected to feel better and happier, but I really underestimated the impact my transition would have. I didn’t realize that life could be this easy, that I could ever feel this comfortable. It was unimaginable.”

“No, really. There is something in testosterone that makes talking and gossiping really grating. I’ve stopped talking as much. I’ve noticed that Jen can talk endlessly.” He shrugged. “I just kind of zone out.”

“You just don’t care!”

“I just don’t care!” He laughed. “I’ve learned that the differences between men and women are so biological. I think if people realized that, it would be easier. I would be a great relationship counselor. I know the difference that hormones really make.”

Photo

Chastity Bono with her parents, Sonny and Cher Bono, in 1972. Chaz Bono, after his sex change, with his girlfriend, Jennifer Elia, and with his mother.Credit
From left: Bettmann/Corbis; Kevin Winter, via Getty Images; Paul Buck, via European Pressphoto Agency

Sex, for him, is completely different now. “I am completely monogamous,” he said, “but I need release much more often than Jen does.”

The weirdest guy thing he does now?

“I got way more gadget-oriented, I have to say. I don’t know why. Definitely since transitioning I’ve wanted to be up on the latest, coolest toy.”

IN their offices on Hollywood Boulevard, Messrs. Bailey and Barbato, the directors, disabused me of the rest of my Cher-related notions.

“That’s a sexy theory, but no,” Mr. Barbato told me. “People don’t change their sex to get back at their parents, any more than people become gay to get back at their parents.”

The two men compared today’s cultural blind spot regarding transgender people to attitudes about homosexuality during World War II, when homosexuals in the armed forces were considered psychiatrically abnormal and were court-martialed and dishonorably discharged. Although many in the psychiatric and transgender communities consider gender identity disorder a medical issue, it is still classified as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association — a stigma that is difficult for any marginalized group to shake.

“The notion of trans is incomprehensible to most people,” Mr. Bailey said. “It is so foreign.”

One of the most interesting aspects of their film is the fact that although Chaz makes the physical transition, the more demanding transition, arguably, is the emotional one that everyone around him must make. There is, in essence, a death and mourning of Chastity, the woman, and an adjustment to Chaz, whom his girlfriend now compares to dating “Chastity’s twin brother.”

But I couldn’t stop asking about Cher.

“Cher is very real in this film,” Mr. Barbato said. “She’s not editing herself. She’s processing this majorly traumatic thing for any mother: She’s struggling with the fact that her daughter has turned into a man.”

Mr. Bailey brings up a fascinating moment in the film: He asks Cher a question, and she just stares, motionless and unblinking as a cobra — an excruciatingly long and pregnant pause. Then her whole posture shifts. She says, “If I woke up tomorrow in the body of a man, I couldn’t get to the surgeon fast enough.” Right then and there it occurs to her how to relate to it.

I bring up how uncomfortable we are as a society with people who don’t fit into the usual gender roles, how they can seem unsettling on a visceral level, like a dangling participle or an unresolved chord.

“I like things that are incomplete,” Mr. Bailey said. “Life is unresolvedness.”

I felt slightly less lame about my own process of understanding when Rosie O’Donnell (a curator of OWN’s social documentary series) told me, in a phone interview, that she, too, had to pave some inner potholes en route to accepting gender transitioning.

“As a gay woman, I found it hard to understand,” she said. “I know some very masculine gay women, and I wondered if this wasn’t some kind of repressed homophobia, where being straight makes it more O.K. But all of us struggle with whatever it is: special-needs kids, gay people. We all have our speed bumps.”

History mostly demonstrates the violence of embracing either pole of moral certainty. The black and white of gender identification has always pushed an infinitude of differences into the margins. Who knows? To finally usher a complete color wheel of sexuality into the mainstream, perhaps it takes a child of Cher.

Correction: May 15, 2011

An article last Sunday about the gender transitioning of Chaz (formerly Chastity) Bono misstated the classification of gender identity disorder. Although many in the psychiatric and transgender communities consider it a medical issue and there is considerable debate over whether to classify it as such, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual — IV, the standard reference for psychiatric disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association, classifies it as a mental disorder; that classification did not end in 1999.

A version of this article appears in print on May 8, 2011, on Page ST1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Reluctant Transgender Role Model. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe